Thank you for writing this, and the post before. As a reader it is one of my ultimate frustrations that we never got to read the finished version of The Last Tycoon, but perhaps him completing such a mature work would have undone the meaning of the longer real life work he was the protagonist of, ‘The Life of F Scott Fitzgerald’. So much of his life expresses an idea of America - beautiful, glamorous, ungraspable and ultimately ruinous for those who reach for it - that for him to have lived out his days in a second act as a clean former alcoholic writing great fiction in LA might have somehow robbed us of the intertextual Uber Novel he was living and the meanings we’re all still reading into it. I don’t want art to break all of the people who make it, but somehow his life and the way it played out has a meaning that sits as a counterpoint and compliment to his fiction. We’re still trying to fill the silences left by his voice and way of seeing, and suspect because of this unfinished work we always will be.
Thank you for writing this, and the post before. As a reader it is one of my ultimate frustrations that we never got to read the finished version of The Last Tycoon, but perhaps him completing such a mature work would have undone the meaning of the longer real life work he was the protagonist of, ‘The Life of F Scott Fitzgerald’. So much of his life expresses an idea of America - beautiful, glamorous, ungraspable and ultimately ruinous for those who reach for it - that for him to have lived out his days in a second act as a clean former alcoholic writing great fiction in LA might have somehow robbed us of the intertextual Uber Novel he was living and the meanings we’re all still reading into it. I don’t want art to break all of the people who make it, but somehow his life and the way it played out has a meaning that sits as a counterpoint and compliment to his fiction. We’re still trying to fill the silences left by his voice and way of seeing, and suspect because of this unfinished work we always will be.